Ukrainians divorce less

Ukraine’s Minister of Justice Mykola ONISCHUK said that, based on the civil registrars’ office records, 69,000 Ukrainian couples got divorced in the first half of 2009. This 15 percent less than in the first six months of 2008 and 20 percent less as compared to the respective period of 2007, the minister’s Press Service told UNIAN.

The number of divorces is traditionally 20–40 percent smaller than that of marriages in a given year. This positive trend is stable and has been registered every year. For example, more than 118,000 marriages have been registered this year—42 percent than the number of divorces. Statistics shows that the Transcarpathian region has the most solid families, with the annual number of registered marriages exceeding that of divorces 2.5–3 times. Similar figures have been recorded this year for most of western Ukraine. In particular, the marriage–divorce rate in Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Rivne, and Ternopil oblasts is 2.5 to 1.

The greatest number of weddings in the first six months of 2009 took place in Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Kharkiv, and Odesa oblasts, and the city of Kyiv. These figures largely correlate with the size of the oblast population. For the same reason most divorces were registered in virtually the same regions: Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kharkiv oblasts, as well as in the city of Kyiv.